Ubuntu Linux losing popularity fast. New Unity interface to blame?| Royal Pingdom

[Lee Reynolds]

I run a mixture of Kubuntu, Centos, and Fedora systems, along with WinXP
and Win7.

I've never used Unity, nor have I ever laid eyes on whatever the current
version of Gnome is, except perhaps as screenshot on some webpage.

I started using Kubntu back when Fedora made the switch to KDE 4, which
was so pathetically and painfully broken at the time that the developers
would have been sued were KDE a commercial product.  Kubuntu was still
using version 3.5, and by the time they made the switch to 4.x, it had
matured to the point it was usable.

Today kde 4.6 and 4.7 work very well.  Kubuntu 11.10 works great, as did
11.04 and 10.10 and 10.04.  There are of course a few rough edges on
this latest version, but nothing catastrophic.  

KDE is not particularly attractive straight out of the box, but it is
easy to update and configure to your liking.

If Ubuntu is not working well because of Gnome/Unity problems, try
Kubuntu.  

If you're familiar with the Windows UI conventions you'll be right at
home.




Lee Reynolds
Tech Support Analyst Sr
ASU Advanced Computing Center
a2c2.asu.edu

GWC-178
480.965.9460 (Office)
480.458.7434 (Mobile)



-----Original Message-----
From: plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
[mailto:plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of
Michael Butash
Sent: Wednesday, November 30, 2011 4:05 PM
To: plug-discuss at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
Subject: Re: Ubuntu Linux losing popularity fast. New Unity interface to
blame?| Royal Pingdom

I've used every version of ubuntu since 6.04 on the desktop (and
extensive server) full-time, and while it's always been a bit cranky, it
was always the most together and solid linux.  Packaging was simply
never a problem, nor were dependencies (ahem, redhat and spawn).

It became quite literally perfect for me with 8.04, that everything just
worked.  At 8.10, it began going downhill, getting more bugs and system
problems than ever in prior perfect stable configs.  Natty was the first
that simply pissed me off, with unity being utterly broken and unusable
out of the box.

There were some rumblings on list about Unity that got me thinking, and
needing to replace a failing ssd and reinstalling, I would need to deal
with it going to 11.10.  Dealing with Oneiric has been a disaster over
the past 4 days.  Unity was just as broken out of box for me on it as it
was on natty to the point I literally installed KDE to be rid of it. 
Even Gnome3 installed unlaunchably broken and wouldn't work on my
hardware.  I gave up on KDE after a day and went back to conquer Unity,
and after 2 days of hacking and digging, I've gotten it to reboot (which
it does often) perfectly.  When it doesn't rearrange my md raid devices
randomly and fall to initrd prompts to manually assemble the crypto disk
at least.

I really have no clue what most people would do having to face these
problems as I've literally had to debug xwindows (thanks ati), compiz,
unity, nautilus, mdadm, initrd, crypto subsystems, which are just things
someone shouldn't have to do to get this working where I have had
like-configs running for years perfectly before.  ATI and Compiz is the
worst of it.  I also had to write scripts to start/stop compiz and
dockbars between windows reliably, disable as much unity as possible
because it simply doesn't work, and still minecraft and virtualbox crash
my system hard if I resize them it in random ways.  I loves me some
ubuntu right about now, instability sucks.

Is Ubuntu slipping in popularity?  Regardless of the pain, my next
system update absolutely won't be ubuntu after natty and oneiric.  It
actually saddens me a bit to say it after 6 years of loyalty too.

-mb


On 11/30/2011 11:30 AM, Kevin Fries wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-11-30 at 11:20 -0700, Eric Shubert wrote:
>> I'm using Ubuntu LTS (10.4) on my workstation. That's due to be 
>> upgraded with 12.4, at which time I'll need to make a decision. I'll 
>> evaluate that version of Unity, but expect I might be going with 
>> GUbuntu, or else go back to Fedora. I really don't want to be 
>> upgrading my workstation every 6 months though.
>
> Take a serious look at PinguyOS.  Its based upon Gnome Shell, and adds

> some very awesome software back in that Ubuntu has either not included

> (Gloobus-preview&  Gloobus-sushi, Docky, etc) or Ubuntu has 
> discontinued (Synaptic).
>
> Kevin
>
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